A stringed wonder

greek bouzouki

Music occupies a special place in the history of any country. Greece is no exception. In fact, it is heartening to note that Greeks believe music to be a gift from the gods owing to its therapeutic effects on the wellbeing of its listeners. No celebration or gathering, be it religious or otherwise, is complete without music here.

The history of music in Greece reveals certain interesting facts. For instance, Greeks attribute certain musical instruments to particular deities — Olympian god Hermes to lyre, shepherd god Pan to panpipes, the goddess of wisdom and military victory Athena to the wind instrument aulos and so on. It is also learnt that ancient Greeks preferred stringed instruments to the wind ones as the former allowed the musician to both sing and play the instrument, for they valued the lyrics of the song as much as they did the musical sounds.

While Greek music is traditionally associated with lyre, aulos and syrinx, the other instruments like the kithara (guitar), askaulos (bagpipe), salpinx (trumpet) and rhoptron (tambourine) are equally important.

One such interesting instrument I came across on my recent trip to Greece is bouzouki, a stringed instrument. It caught my fancy only because of the fact that it resembled mandolin, an instrument I am very familiar with. A long-necked plucked instrument, bouzouki is played with a plectrum in the right hand, even as the strings are dealt with in the left hand. Very popular at social gatherings, the musical sounds played with bouzouki lend themselves superbly to a variety of musical genres from across the world, ranging from folk to rock to jazz.

Another bit of interesting snippet about bouzouki is that it was an integral part of rebetika, a musical genre associated with the Greek underworld! The name comes from the Turkish word bozuk, meaning ‘broken’ or ‘modified’, and comes in two types — trichordo, with three pairs of strings, and tetrachordo, with four pairs of strings.

Owing to the wide range of its musical expression, it is a very popular instrument even to this day.